2 January 2021 — Ending/Beginning/Forgiving/Forgetting

One year has ended and another begun and some of us hope that things will be different and better this year. Unfortunately, I do not think improvements in our lives will happen automatically just because it is a New Year. Will the boss we don’t get on with leave? Will we leave? Will things troubling us generally in our lives automatically improve? Probably not.

We can welcome the New Year, the New Beginning by forgiving ourselves and those we feel treat us unfairly, or seem to be ’out to get us’. We can choose to forget —or at least to put at the back of our minds — those incidents which have upset us. We can employ the Butterfly Meditation (Blog for the 29th December 2020) and allow our thoughts to settle in our Solar Plexus area as energy allowing us to be at peace and thus able to send love to those who seem to have problems with us.

In his book, The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz, lists the Second Agreement as ‘Don’t Take Anything Personally’. This I have found to be good advice, as how others react to us and treat us, says much more I believe, about the way THEY are feeling than about US. And, we DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE OTHERS COMMENTS ABOUT US PERSONALLY if, when on examining our behaviour we feel we have done nothing to elicit such criticism,

So as we enter the New Year we CAN MAKE IT A NEW BEGINNING merely by refusing to get upset at criticism we feel is unjust and by trusting our feelings.

H.H. THE X14TH DALA LAMA writes under the heading FORGIVENESS:

IT WOULD BE MUCH MORE CONSTRUCTIVE IF PEOPLE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND THEIR SUPPOPSED ENEMIES.

LEARNING TO FORGIVE IS MUCH MORE USEFUL THAN MERELY PICKING UP A STONE AND THROWING IT AT THE OBJECT OF ONE’S ANGER. THE MORE SO WEEHN THE PRPOVOCATION IS EXTREME. FOR IT IS UNDER THE GREATEST ADVERSITY THAT THERE EXISTS THE GREATEST POTENTIAL FOR DOING GOOD. BOTH FOR ONESELF AND OTHERS.